Month: November 2017

There is a clear picture being presented by the Guardian, whereby the Israeli government is becoming more and more extreme, making life for Israel Arabs a misery with no prospects for improvement. But is this really true? An examination of the record of this government reveals a very different picture – this much maligned government has actually done a very significant amount to improve the lives of Israeli Arabs.

What makes an editor leave in a comment such as “Jewish people are good with money”? And what makes the main presenter not pick up such a comment? This was the scenario in Chris Tarrant’s Extreme Railways shown on Channel 5 on Monday night when Tarrant visited Jordan and Israel. In Jordan he travelled the route of the now defunct Hejaz Railway and visited Petra.

The repeated media lie that ‘Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital’ represents a broader UK media pattern of what we call ‘advocacy journalism’: the belief held by many reporters that they have a moral duty (in the spirit of ‘comforting the afflicted and afflicting the powerful’) to advocate on behalf of Palestinians and give credence to their narrative, a duty which transcends their ethical responsibilities as professional journalists to be objective and tell the truth.

It’s not just that the Guardian gives the erroneous impression that the movement is larger and more influential than it really is. Their contributors, journalists and editors also continually downplay the true goals of BDS, misleadingly casting their leaders as ‘progressives’ who merely seek to end the occupation.

Jackie Walker is the former Vice-Chair of Britain’s far-left group Momentum who was suspended from the Labour Party due to accusations of antisemitism. In the Sunday Observer (sister publication of the Guardian), Alexei Sayle lauded Walker’s play “The Lynching”, a theatrical attempt to justify and explain the views that made her controversial.

Once again, the Guardian has erased a chapter within the well-documented ethnic cleansing of over 800,000 Jews from Arab countries in the mid 20th century. The latest example involves the history of Jews in Iraq, in the context of a short review by their film critic Peter Bradshaw of Fiona Murphy’s documentary ‘Remembering Baghdad’.

Would the Daily Mail ever describe an attack in London by black men on a Jewish man as a ‘black attack’ or highlight the attacker’s skin colour in the headline? Unless there’s recently been a spate of such acts of violence in London by orthodox Jews, we fail to see why the religion of these alleged attackers is pertinent to the story at all.

Once again, a British publication has told news consumers Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel, and, once again, UK Media Watch has prompted a correction to this false claim. The most recent example involves a Daily Mail article in the Nov. 7th print edition about the Priti Patel row.

Following our complaints to Daily Mail editors, we received a reply from the journalist who wrote the piece, apologising for using the word “tentacles” to describe the influence of a pro-Israel group in the UK. He explained that he was unfamiliar with its antisemitic associations and informed us that the word would be removed from the op-ed.

Despite the continuous amplification of BDS in the British media, the movement to boycott Israel has had no discernible impact on Israel’s economy, and each month we see more and more examples of Israeli success and BDS fails. Here’s the latest installment in our ongoing series of posts documenting this dynamic.

Israel, and only Israel, is judged exclusively by a list of its (perceived and real) flaws. With remarkable confidence, journalists throw together opinions, a few stories, select quotes, and feelings of impending doom – and hey presto, Israel is demonised. Israel is not a uniquely bad country. Journalism about Israel is often uniquely bad journalism

A Guardian editorial claimed that Israel has ‘banned’ Arab political parties. In fact, as we noted in a complaint to editors, though there was, in 2009, a decision by the Israel Central Elections Committee to bar two Israeli Arab parties due to allegations they supported terrorism, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the ‘ban’ only two weeks later, before it could go into effect. The Guardian upheld our complaint and issued a correction.

The Economist has been gushing about what it calls ‘Morocco’s little idyll of Jewish-Muslim coexistence’. Yet, the Nov. 2nd article it admits that only three Jews still live in Essaouira – a city which used to have as many Jews as Muslims before the great exodus to Israel.

An article in the Financial Times included the claim that there are ‘Jews-only’ roads in the West Bank. However, as CAMERA has demonstrated on multiple occasions, there are not, nor have there ever been, anywhere in Israel or the West Bank, roads exclusively for Jews.

Beyond the specific lies and distortions in Abbas’s Guardian op-ed lay a broader one: that Palestinians are victims who possess no moral agency and that Palestinian leadership shares no responsibility for their people’s suffering. It’s not merely unfair to assigned exclusive blame to Israel for every conceivable Palestinian failure, but also suggests a fundamental flaw in the Palestinian national movement.